A Leadership Beyond

Tom and Adrienne spent time with Karen Jaw-Madson, owner of consultancy Co. -Design of Work Experience and author of Culture Your Culture. Although this conversation concludes our series on Reimagining Human Resources, in a sense, the topic never ends. The vision for this community is to provide insights, ideas, and network that enables us to reimagine leadership considering our new reality. To build sustainable and thriving organizations, culture must continuously be in focus.

The discussion formed around the question, "what does culture have to do with HR?"

We explore why NOW is a critical time for organizations to assess their culture against their values and the needs of their people – employees, customers, community, and selves.

Here's a hint – there's more demand for a caring organization.

Cultures are woven by threads of the little things, the day-to-day behaviors that leaders and all employees demonstrate what really matters to the organization. Culture and values are experienced, not just proclaimed.

Values and mission statements can be written on the walls, but it's the way people show up and what behavior is encouraged and reinforced that defines the rules and expectations of the organization.

Karen explains that "culture is the thing behind everything. Anything that has the power to affect and influence perceptions, behaviors, mindsets…"

So, exactly how does an organization assess their culture and change it? It doesn't happen by accident unless you want to leave it up to chance. If there is a desire to shape a culture to support those values and mission statements, it takes intention and a well-executed plan.

Karen draws from, and brilliantly merges her knowledge of design thinking, HR practice, appreciative inquiry, as well as other disciplines. Most importantly, Karen stays people-focused from a business result perspective.

Listen to our interview with Karen to understand how you can diagnose your current culture (team or organization) and the steps you can take immediately to impact your culture. Truly, a leadership beyond!

Your voice matters. As always, we invite you to join this conversation.

If you find value in this community, please invite ONE of your friends or colleagues to subscribe to our community:

As a community of conversation, A Leadership Beyond ranks the ability to facilitate effective and meaningful conversations high on the leadership excellence pyramid. To accomplish this requires an awareness, a framework, and continuous practice.

This is a terrific book, not merely to read, but to serve as a practice guide to help us evaluate and improve our conversations over time.

Conversations Worth Having – second edition

In this interview, Jackie and Cheri clearly define and demonstrate the value of appreciative inquiry by giving real world examples to illustrate the power of positive framing, teach us the why and how of asking generative questions, and demonstrate the path to avoiding the negative spiral of difficult conversations while moving collaboratively in a positive direction. This practice can help us create an environment where everyone is seen, heard, and understood.

From the foundation of this environment, we can:

• Make the invisible visible
• Create shared understanding
• Generate new knowledge
• Inspire greater possibility
• Reveal and examine hidden assumptions

We are confident you will enjoy and benefit from this conversation with Jackie and Cheri.

We hope you engage us in conversation so we can learn together how to thrive and meet challenges from a place of hopeful curiosity and deep appreciation.

This is a marvelous way to begin the New Year!

The clearer we get, the greater our capacity to handle a steady pace.

First, we need to catch our breath, step back, get centered, anchored, and focus on the people engagement and alignment. A rational business strategy without the team behind it is unlikely to have successful execution, and certainly not quickly or effectively.

As an experienced change leader, and a Talent Optimization specialist, Adrienne knows the principle, in fact teaches it, practices it, and works to instill this principle in leaders as they navigate the people side of change.

Tom asks, "What do you do when things get out of control and just want to scream -Ahhhhh!?"

Adrienne shares an example: new people, people leaving, a change management team experiencing rapid people transition – And yet, expectations for rapid progress creates frustration and a cycle of more people transition.

It feels as though there is no time to step back and do real work on team dynamics rather than keep pushing our to do lists.

Back to the fundamentals! What did Adrienne do?

"I stopped". "Without that pause, we would have kept running the race and we didn't even know what the race was for, and we were running anyway, with no direction."

Adrienne did not discover something new here. She rediscovered something that became suppressed by the pressure of the pace and a desire to "make progress".

We need to frequent reminders of what we already know! Reactivity is ignited by our rapid-fire doings.

As a reminder, Adrienne keeps a post it note that paraphrases Brené Brown: "Notice it. Sit with it. And then put it in perspective."

A Leadership Beyond variation –

Notice it, sit with it, put it into perspective through authentic conversation.

This recent example reminds us that better leadership is a process, not an event. Enduring p provide our compass; and rest assured we will get off track, so alignment, and realignment is the continuous process. This example also illustrates three of our top ten values. People first, Generative conversation, Collaboration for talent optimization. (Stay tuned for the publishing of A Leadership Beyond top ten values).

This conversation naturally led Adrienne and Tom to remember why we founded this community of conversation in the first place. To support fellow leaders (and ourselves) to remember to model leadership principles as we struggle to regain our footing and recreate ourselves and our organizations for success and fulfilment in the decades to come.

As always, we desire to hear your voice in our conversations!

Tom can do it! But not alone.

YOU can do it, but not alone.

Your voice matters in our community of conversation. Can't wait to listen with you.

The top two values of our community (our top 5 will be published shortly) are :

People first – You've heard it said, "our people are our greatest asset". They are not an asset; we don't own them or control them. Rather, they are our greatest investment. (Time, money, energy.) We seek return (personally and professionally), and we desire our counterparts to have equal or greater return on investing their strengths in our shared values and objectives.

Quality Conversation – Let's start with our conversations. At its root, it's "to change together." Conversation can be transformative. It's an exchange. Of energy, words, perspective, time, of care.

Thanksgiving provided us an opportunity to catch our breath and reflect on our gratitude.

Adrienne and Tom are grateful to this emerging community and committed to growing with you as we create a fresh and meaningful work experience in turbulent times. Together!

Tune in/chime in:

We have one more conversation to publish this year:

Barbara Frankel, an expert with over thirty years of experience in training and coaching career development for world-class companies such as JP Morgan Chase and American Express. She will help us transform the great resignation into great retention.

We will publish our conversation with Barbara Frankel on December 21st. Stay tuned!

We will take a publishing break as we work on building the foundation for our new podcast (more on that soon).

We kick off the New Year by publishing our conversation with Internationally recognized leaders in the Appreciative Inquiry community, Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres. We are excited to discuss their recently published Second Edition of Conversations Worth Having.

The Great Resignation provides an opportunity for business leaders to refine their strategies for recruitment and retention by engaging in rigorous support of career development.

The word align can become a buzzword—overused and underleveraged. At a certain level, we know the ingredients to successful talent retention. But how clear is our focus? Do our actions line up with our talk? Or are we throwing money and people at the problem, crossing our fingers that we meet our business goals?

We are thrilled to announce a conversation with Barbara Frankel, an expert with over thirty years of experience in training and coaching career development for world-class companies such as JP Morgan Chase and American Express.

Listen to this brief audio as Barbara highlights the ingredients leaders must align to ensure both individual career paths and organizational success.

You can create a culture for the best place to work future.

We will publish our conversation with Barbara Frankel on December 21st. Stay tuned!

As we prepare for Thanksgiving with our families and friends, we are so grateful for this Community! We hope you will continue to join our conversations. Contribute your challenges, insight, experience, or questions about career fulfillment and development aligned to the leadership challenges of the Great Resignation.

We hold you (and ourselves) as already successful. This means you have meaningful relationships and produce good results. And yet, a leadership beyond calls us to continuously grow and develop. To accomplish this requires heightened conversational awareness.

Jackie and Cheri give us a framework to evaluate our conversations, tools to practice and develop better skills, real-world examples of the impact of this approach, as well as inspiration to nudge us to do the necessary work.

Members of this community of conversation know that we do not pitch. We do invite people to explore resources that can guide us to become the best leaders of Positive Change we can be. So, jump at the opportunity to improve your impact, one conversation at a time:

Conversations Worth Having – second edition

We expect to announce the publish date of our interview prior to our next posting.

As always, we want to have a conversation with YOU.

Tom and Adrienne had the opportunity to interview Dolores Priegnitz, an HR professional, change management expert and life coach.

To help us stay anchored to our empathic leadership intention, Dolores created the acronym LOCAL as a reminder, as well as a practical rudder to keep us headed in the right direction in the face of crazy headwinds that easily take us off course.

Our interview discusses the 5 practices of LOCAL leadership and why it's vitally important to reimagine Human Resources and foster a Leadership Beyond.

Have a listen… and then write this on a sticky note to keep within your sight as you lead your people!

–Listen to employees, leaders, and other colleagues to understand the challenges

–Observe the behaviors, pain points, internal and external cultural influences

–Communicate at all levels, across the organization, up and down

–Act deliberately and as quickly as possible to minimize loss in morale and productivity

–Lead by example and partner with formal and informal leaders to garner support

Stay tuned as we engage leaders for their insights on the art and science of creating effective and sustainable Hybrid work teams.

Our community of conversation is enriched by YOUR voice in the mix.

We've all noticed an acceleration of trends that were bubbling up before Covid.

The gig economy increased remote work, demand for greater flexibility in when, where, and how to work have increasingly challenged organizational leadership.

Dr. Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of business, recently published an article:: The Real Meaning of Freedom of Work:

"When Covid untethered us from our offices, many people experienced new forms of flexibility, and the taste of freedom left us hungry for more. We started rethinking what we wanted out of work. But the Great Resignation is not a mad dash away from the office; it's the culmination of a long march toward freedom. More than a decade ago, psychologists documented a generational shift in the centrality of work in our lives. Millennials were more interested in jobs that provided leisure time and vacation time than Gen Xers and baby boomers. They were less concerned about net worth than net freedom."

Ok, easy to read and say, YES, we want talent, we'll be flexible. If only it was that simple. From the same article:

"In a study led by economist Michael Gibbs, when more than 10,000 employees of a large Asian IT company started working from home during the pandemic, productivity fell even as working hours increased. The researchers didn't measure the physical and emotional toll of Covid, but the data showed that people got less done because they had less time to focus. They were stuck in more group meetings and got interrupted more often."

We (leaders) must navigate the choppy seas of reimagining work in a human-centered way with a holistic approach – Life balance with boundaries, meaningful work experience, dynamic relationships, service to the broader community, and profit.

We don't come with the answers; rather, we come with a desire to foster a community of conversation to learn together.

Please take a moment to watch the short video as we set the sail for a dynamic conversation on Hybrid Leadership.

We hope your voice, experience, and perspective are in the mix!

Tom and Adrienne caught up with Eric Zemaitaitis, HR Director at a major healthcare system in Chicago. The challenge statement that opened our discussion: What are the challenges organizations face when relying solely on HR to develop leaders?

Leadership development courses are fantastic. But then the expert goes away – the external consultant is no longer engaged or the in-house facilitator from HR moves to the next thing. As Tom said "continuous, small reinforcements rather than big events is the way!" We agree, but practically speaking how is this accomplished?

In this casual chat, we explore how can we facilitate leadership development, so it makes a real difference and becomes "how leaders lead here"? Grab your cup of coffee and listen in as Eric, Tom and Adrienne share ideas to reinforce, retain and further grow the skills gained during those leadership courses.

We'd love to hear your ideas for helping leaders continue to practice the skills they gain during formal learning. What have you done to help leaders continue their journey to become leaders their people want to follow?

This short interview will give you a clear, easy to grasp definition of Talent Optimization and an understanding of the four dark forces that every organization must grapple with. You'll also get a visual demonstration of how this leadership framework and set of tools can help you win in the face of these challenges.

You can trust your intuition to make the best choices during this unprecedented change, or you can map it out and do it with intention and by design.